[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO
William Redpath
wredpath2 at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 2 08:18:44 EDT 2017
Yes. Bill Redpath
--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 4/1/17, Arvin Vohra <votevohra at gmail.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO
To: lnc-business at hq.lp.org
Date: Saturday, April 1, 2017, 6:50 PM
Yes
On Mar 29, 2017 8:34
PM, "Brett Bittner" <brett.bittner at lp.org>
wrote:
I vote Aye on email ballot
2017-06.
Brett
**This message sent from my phone. Please excuse any
typos.
On Mar 29, 2017 20:31,
"Caryn Ann Harlos" <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
wrote:
To supplement the other update and
relevant to this motion: I now have two volunteers willing
to dedicate an entire week block of time if the records are
in the Denver area to work on the project. This is with
minimal word of mouth from person(s) who read the LNC
list. I believe I would get several regular crews. LPCO
already has a commitment to its history (unfortunately some
records list due to past neglect prior to my time and were
soiled by vermin). I am a prolific volunteer recruiter
when I need them.
-Caryn Ann
On Tue, Mar 28,
2017 at 3:19 PM Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi
Joshua, any historical work with a budget is going to
require prioritization which requires knowing what we
have. If it were just the records in the basement, that
would not be an issue (another volunteer I found just spent
two more days there - total volunteer time on the project
now totals likely over a 100 hours between inventory work
and LPedia database fix issues - IOW significant volunteer
has already been expended - we have been effective). It is
the storage facility records that are the issue. If they
remain there, one possible avenue to keep staff uninvolved
as much as possible is to grant me the key to designate to a
certain core group of volunteers in the area to be
determined. I am confident that whatever is decided, we
will make the most effective, cheapest, least intrusive
means possible. As I said, I will have to spend vacation
time in VA this summer if they are not moved. I do not
require any staff oversight, but that money could go to the
Party rather than Southwest and Marriot.
And
no, this year that expense will not grow (and next year is a
different budget discussion). I am convinced it is too
high by at least $1000 (unless salary is way more than I
figure in my head - which of course would be a confidential
discussion). And I want to remind everyone that I already
raised nearly $1200 and promised an additional $1500 if the
move was approved. So if I am right (and I am pretty
convinced I am) that the $9000 figure is correct, taking
away the pledge and the amount raised, we are at $6800.
Which is only $1800 more than the LNC expected already to
come out of the budget (and most certainly money will be
raised toward that) in additional to the free professional
labor. Putting aside that this is my project and I have a
bias, we need to be supporting these volunteer initiative
small projects. I could wax long about that, but I will
save it to not bore everyone to death with this post. But
you are right, we have spent more discussing a relatively
trivial amount with a potential result of volunteered time,
product, and good will way beyond the amount. For once, I
am nearly talked out - miracle of miracle. I have never
tried so hard to give away so many hours of my professional
time over several years.
I
don't think there is much btw that falls in some third
category. I do think that is somewhat of a false premise.
I broadly went through records in the facility and it was
not that category (membership slips should be scanned IMHO -
whether they are published is a different decision). There
are filing cabinets in the basement which do, but which have
always been outside our scope.
I
find it interesting that it seems there is a critique that
the original scanning budget has not been spent - it seems
my prudence and caution is being used as a point of
suspicion rather than good stewardship which rather reminds
me of government budgeting. I could have spent it in a
week. I am determined to squeeze it for every penny but it
seems that this suggestion would have had a lot less
discussion if I were irresponsible. I did get some advice
to just spent it right away being cautioned about this very
thing. I don't operate that way. I treat OPM (other
people's money) as sacred. I have spent my own money
on misc items rather than nickel or diming this.
Volunteers have spent days from their vacation time -
neither of them lived by HQ, one was further away in VA and
the other was all the way from AZ.
PS:
I have a volunteer willing to commit a full week of time
to assisting with these records,, if they are moved to
CO.
-Caryn
Ann
On
Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Joshua Katz <planning4liberty at gmail.com>
wrote:
Well,
let me say this: the debate on this motion has entirely
changed my view on the questions involved. One thing I am
gleaning from the debate, though, is that different people
are talking about entirely different issues and concerns,
and several of those issues are not well-framed enough to be
answered in a yes/no manner. For a while, I thought the
debate was largely off-track because it was getting into the
weeds, but now I realize that some of those weeds are LNC
concerns, and others, despite ideally not being LNC
concerns, have become such due to a lack of other governance
mechanisms. I will attempt here to lay out what I see as
the issues being discussed - largely independently - and
suggest that the question be narrowed.
The
Stuff
We
have piles of stuff, is what I'm gathering. We passed
a motion a while ago, creating the Historical Committee,
which I think was implicitly premised on the idea that the
stuff falls into two groups: garbage, and things we wish
to preserve for historical value. At least, that was my
implicit premise. Now we're finding, though, that
there's a third group: things we wish to preserve for
legal/business purposes. This suggests to me that our
handling of the previous motion might not have been
sufficient because of this faulty premise. So we're
left with a broad question: how to handle all this
stuff. I think a lot of us thought our previous motion
would take care of that, but perhaps it will not if this
third category exists.
Financial
Considerations
This
is what I originally thought this motion was all about -
spending money. In particular, it seems to me that this
motion is based on the idea that the money we previously
allocated was not sufficient. This gives me independent
concerns: if the expected cost of a project doubles in a
matter of weeks, experience shows us that it is likely to
continue rising. I also would like to know how we learned
this - since none of the originally allocated money has been
spent, and the proposed increase is exactly the amount
allocated, why can't the allocated money be spent to do
this? While much discussion has been about the proposed
object, the motion seems to me only to authorize money, and
to take for granted that the moving can be done by staff as
long as the money is there.
Now,
assuming there's some other use for the original $5k, I
don't think what Wes has told us suggests that we can do
this project for either $5k or $10k. I think it suggests
that the cost of the project is (at least) $10k, once staff
time is included, as it should be. A functionally
allocated budget would have made this clear, whereas with
our current budgeting procedures it has to come out in
discussion and remain a little fuzzy, but that's how
I'm reading it. We can spend the additional $5k in
cash, or we can spend it in lost staff time. That brings
up a new question, then - since we approved the project at
$5k, do we still think it is worth doing at $10k? I think
that's perfectly well-framed to be answered with a
yes/no decision. However, what is less clear is what
happens if we say no. One option is that things would
remain at status quo, and we'd continue paying for
storage space. Another is to throw everything out. There
are probably other options, too.
The
Value of Things in Storage
Focusing
for a moment on the items of business/legal significance, I
think that, if a clean-up project does not proceed, they
might as well be in the trash. It is extremely unlikely
that things can be found when needed, and it would be
healthier, when such a concern comes up, to be able to say
cheerfully "yep, it's gone," than to have a
vague notion that it may exist in a large pile of stuff,
buried under furniture.
Turning
to the historical items, I confess to being less interested
in these than others are, but I take the result of the vote
to suggest that we find it important, and so we're
unlikely to think they're worth preserving at $5k, but
worth throwing out if it would cost $10k. In the grand
scheme of things, $5k is not much money, and it's
believed that there are donations available to support much
of this. In my mind, though, such donations are currently
speculative - and I can speculate that costs will continue
rising. So let's ignore both speculations and assume
we'll be spending the money out of what's currently
in our budget - it's still rather small and not worth
much of the time spent discussing it. Heck, it's the
amount we let the chair spend freely - which raises one
possible solution. More generally, it raises the idea that
we should be freer with allocating budgets to projects
without involving ourselves in the questions of how the
money is spent. Personally, I find it baffling that we
turn over the vast majority of our budget to staff, yet
insist on weird control mechanisms for small portions -
putting the most control on money to be spent by committees,
largely populated by board members. I have no idea why we
single out budget access, for instance, for EC control (why
not, at least, control by the people directing ballot
access?), but leave half the budget in Compensation. But
then, I don't understand many things about the
world.
Budgetary
Impact
That
said, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this,
when donations are available for a given project, it is not
always clear if they will increase total revenue, or simply
be taken out of other giving the same people might otherwise
have planned. I suspect the answer is somewhere in the
middle - a $10k project, fully funded by donations, will not
cost us $10k, but also will not cost us $0, all things
considered.
Why
is There a Pile of Stuff?
I
think Wes has well explained this one - people are afraid to
throw things out. A few years ago, I was elected Secretary
of my fire department. I went through old minutes and
found that all correspondence was there - i.e. Christmas
cards, invitations to Climb for Life, for decades. This
doesn't make it particularly easy to do the project I
was engaged in - no one had kept records of standing rules,
so I was attempting to reconstruct them from old minutes.
(A fun story for anyone who says "I don't see
what's wrong with including discussion in the
minutes" or who fails to see why it is important to
record the actual language of the motion.) Anyway, with a
custom going back decades, it's hard to be the one who
decides to break it. The solution is a document retention
policy, which we should come up with. I will move in
Pittsburgh that we appoint a committee to recommend
one.
How
to Throw Things Out
Although
we have agreed that the LNC will make this decision, based
on this discussion, I am questioning the wisdom of that
move. I think if a committee is going through this
material, and if we have adopted such a policy, that
committee should be free to throw things out within that
policy. Currently, as the Secretary notes, making these
calls would take a good amount of expertise with the
specifics of the materials. With a document retention plan
in place, I don't think it will. I think it would be
crazy for the LNC to make document by document decisions,
personally. Let's set some rules about what sorts of
things we want to keep, and then let volunteers have at
it.
Purpose
of Historical Committee
As
the Secretary notes, we appointed a historical committee,
not a clean-up committee. If it turns out that cleaning up
is necessary before the historical work can be done, we need
to decide if the historical committee is the right committee
for that purpose, or if something else needs to be done
first.
Joshua
A. Katz
On
Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:36 PM, Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi
Alicia,
My
recommendations will be primarily about duplicates. I do
believe I am experienced enough to determine a duplicate.
I also undertook a similar (obviously smaller scale but in
principle the same) project already in Colorado (http://www.lpcolorado.org/arc
hives).
The
rest would be done via inventory and in consultation with
more experienced Party members.
I
do not have experience in years, but I have experience in
diving in more deeply than persons with twenty years of
experience have done. Further CO has a wide breath of
available persons to volunteer.
Right
now there is no danger of anyone's experience because
it simply isn't being done, and unless another person
with the passion I have for the topic appears, it likely
will not in any forseeable future. It hasn't so
far.
I
respectfully submit that making recommendations is not
complicated and I believe I have proven my understanding on
historical artifacts.
-Caryn
Ann
On
Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Alicia Mattson <agmattson at gmail.com>
wrote:
Starchild,
My
concerns are not about the city in which the analysis is
done, but about the depth of experience of the person
analyzing the contents in order to characterize them for the
decision maker(s).
-Alicia
On
Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 4:34 PM, Starchild <sfdreamer at earthlink.net>
wrote:
Alicia,
If there were an
amendment or second motion that none of the materials to be
sent to Colorado be discarded without an elected or
appointed member of the party leadership gives the okay,
would that allay your concerns? Or perhaps a
motion/amendment saying certain categories of things
can't be discarded, period? Having seen the kind of
stuff that's sometimes been left behind and thrown away
after LP conventions – current outreach materials, unused
office supplies, etc. – not to mention stuff being deleted
from our website, old meeting minutes and other important
records apparently having been thrown out by people at
various times, etc., I share your concern that things might
get thrown out which would better be saved.
Where we may possibly
see things differently is that I don't perceive there
being a greater risk of this occurring in Colorado than in
Alexandria. The discarding of minutes and other important
past materials presumably took place in the D.C. area. More
recently, Wes mentioned in a recent message that he
discarded some stuff, and although I trust there were no
minutes among those materials, there wasn't a lot of
detail provided about precisely what they did
include, and I can't help wondering whether anything was
discarded that I personally might have kept. I might have
the same concern upon hearing of stuff discarded in
Colorado, of course, but I wouldn't be any more
concerned.
Love
& Liberty,
((( starchild
)))At-Large
Representative, Libertarian National Committee
(415)
625-FREE
@StarchildSF
On
Mar 26, 2017, at 2:16 PM, Alicia Mattson wrote:
The
discussion on this thread paints the motion in a very
different light for me. I want to take a step back and put
this in context.
The
motion adopted by email ballot to create this committee
included the following scope description:
"The
LNC establishes a Historic Preservation Committee to help
preserve and publish historical documents of the party and
to manage LPedia."
The
goal is to preserve and publish things of historical
value.
This
motion suggests that the newly-requested funds will be
used:
"to
budget an additional $5,000 (budget line 90) to relocate the
historical records in the Duke Street basement and in the
off-site
storage facility to a location in Colorado..."
That
to me sounds like the materials in question are of
historical value, and it thus warrants the expenditure to
preserve them.
What
we're learning, though, is that possibly the vast
majority of this material is trash, and we're paying
thousands of dollars to ship trash to Colorado to be thrown
away there.
This
is really more of a document destruction project than a
historical preservation project, though along the way it
will likely find a few historical documents worth
preserving.
We
created a Historic Perservation Committee, rather than a
Basement Cleanout Committee, and they're very different
tasks.
I
would be comfortable with volunteers in Colorado taking
things deemed to have historic value and scanning them for
preservation, or making them available for silent auction
fundraising, etc.
I
am not comfortable with volunteers in Colorado who have no
experience in operations of our headquarters essentially
making decisions about what documents get thrown away.
The
reason I spent a day in the Watergate dungeon (I think it
was in the fall of 2011) digging through that material is
because I was looking for some records that should have been
preserved in perpetuity, but someone
who didn't understand their importance apparently threw
them out. They actually had very high value for legal
reasons.
As
pretty as it sounds to have a team of volunteers in the
birthplace of the LP building historical archives, a
person's Colorado residence doesn't grant them
magical knowledge of what business records ought to be kept
and which ones ought to be thrown away.
I
realize that you say that the LNC will ultimately decide
which things get tossed, but the quality of the LNC's
decision depends heavily on the description of the records
we are given. If a volunteer describes to us that a box
contains miscellaneous receipts, it's one thing if
it's 15-year-old receipts for office supplies that have
long since been used up, but it's another if the
receipts are for equipment still in use today and maybe
still under warranty. If a volunteer describes to us that
a box contains old email correspondence with a state chair,
it's one thing if the conversation was, "I look
forward to seeing you at the convention", but it's
another thing if the conversation was relaying facts about a
situation that is the subject of a lawsuit.
If
the person looking at the records doesn't really
understand the context of the records, how can they give us
the key information we need to make an informed decision
about which ones to throw away?
This
is not a project that should be undertaken by people with no
understanding of our party operations.
There
may also be old employment records with sensitive personnel
information, social security numbers, etc., and those
shouldn't just be passed around among random
volunteers.
I
have no objection to paying for the committee chair to make
a trip to the storage facility, spend a few days sorting
through it to find items of historical value, and then
shipping those 10 boxes to Colorado for further
processing. That is within the function of a Historic
Preservation Committee.
I
do have objection to shipping our
trash-mixed-with-important-rec ords across the country for
people who don't understand what is valuable and what
isn't to give us vague descriptions which will be the
basis of uninformed decisions for destroying our records.
This document destruction task is not what I had in mind
when the Historic Preservation Committee was created.
For
several years our outside auditors have been urging us to
adopt document retention policies (and also whistleblower
policies, but that's another subject). I think it was
two terms ago near the end of that term that the Audit
Committee proposed some starter language to try to get the
ball rolling, but the LNC has not yet implemented
anything.
At
minimum we need to establish how long certain records are to
be kept such as employment records, financial records,
membership certifications, and other categories. These can
be important to keep for legal reasons, for FEC compliance,
etc. Even after we make those policy decisions, I think
the document maintenance has to be done by knowledgeable
insiders rather than miscellaneous volunteers.
-Alicia
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--
In
Liberty,Caryn
Ann HarlosRegion
1 Representative, Libertarian National
Committee (Alaska,
Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming,
Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.orgCommunications
Director, Libertarian
Party of ColoradoColorado
State Coordinator, Libertarian
Party Radical Caucus Chair,
LP Historical Preservation Committee
A
haiku to the Statement of Principles:We
defend your rightsAnd
oppose the use of forceTaxation
is theft
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--
In
Liberty,Caryn
Ann HarlosRegion
1 Representative, Libertarian National
Committee (Alaska,
Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming,
Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.orgCommunications
Director, Libertarian
Party of ColoradoColorado
State Coordinator, Libertarian
Party Radical Caucus Chair,
LP Historical Preservation Committee
A
haiku to the Statement of Principles:We
defend your rightsAnd
oppose the use of forceTaxation
is theft
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